Rick Rainey

There are a couple of options for installing the tools that are mentioned here .  Here are the steps to installing Identity and Access Tools from the Extension Manager in Visual Studio: Start Visual Studio 2012. From the menu select TOOLS | Extensions...

[Updated - 10/3/2012: An astute reader pointed out that the sample below will produce some inconsistent results based on the order of the bindings being compared. This is because of things like JIT compilation, internal caching, etc. As a quick fix, I...

Using ASP.NET’s protected configuration feature is recommended when your Web.Config file contains sensitive information.  The .NET Framework gives you two protected configuration providers, DpapiProtectedConfigurationProvider and RsaProtectedConfigurationProvider...

Recently a colleague asked me if I knew of a way to monitor outbound WCF calls for an application. He just wanted to be able to see the number of outbound calls an application was making. Performance Monitor normally provides the answer to these kinds...

Consider this scenario: You have a .NET application that issues HttpWebRequests to a remote server.  You deploy this application to an environment that requires proxy servers be configured using a proxy script file (WPAD / PAC).  The solution...

I recently had the privilege of working with a couple of engineers (Naveed Zaheer and Manoj Kumar) in an internal lab setting to see how much throughput we could achieve through the Managed Services Engine (MSE) and a downstream WCF service hosted in...

So, you want to install the Windows Performance Toolkit ?  This is located in the Windows SDK which you can download here .  If you’re like me, you may not want to blindly install the entire SDK.  The installer options that provide the...

All the samples I’ve seen for ADO.NET Data Services show hosting the service in IIS.  This is a natural choice, especially considering the rich hosting environment IIS provides and the tooling support provided by Visual Studio.  However, it...

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is the platform for building distributed applications. Developers are usually eager to adopt the latest of any technology because, well, it’s the latest. There’s an element of coolness associated with building systems...

In part 1 and 2 , I talked about instancing and concurrency. In this post, the 3 rd and final post on this subject, I’m going to show an example of how you can use throttling to achieve optimal throughput for a service. But first… What is throttling...

From a developers perspective, code is either thread-safe or it is not. WCF will assume your service is not thread-safe unless you tell it otherwise by applying the ConcurrencyMode behavior. Your options for concurrency are Single (default), Multiple...

Building distributed systems using WCF has so many advantages. One of the things I hear consistently from customers is that it allows them to focus their development efforts on writing business logic code and less on having to write “plumbing” code. Still...

It’s well known that long blocking calls in the main user interface (UI) thread of a WinForm client application should be avoided. As users, we certainly get annoyed when the application stops responding. Yet, even today, we see this over-and-over again...

There's a new WCF feature in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 release that I just recently learned about.  It has to do with serialization of SOAP faults when using the XmlSerializer for your service rather than the default DataContractSerializer. Consider...

I am captivated by the work going on in the identity space and as a result have created a collection of resources that I particularly like. If you are interested in this space too and want to know where to go for information, consider these resources...

If you have ever hosted a WCF service in IIS/WAS then you know that the .svc file for your service is the base address.  For example, if you create a web site project called MyService using the WCF Service template, then your base address for that...

Now available here . My installation took about 2 hours and 15 minutes to download and install.  Make sure you set aside some time for updating your development machine. In this post, I am going to talk about some (not all) of the features I particularly...

One of the great new features of Visual Studio 2008 is the new tools for WCF developers.   No longer is it necessary to code up your own test host and test client applications to test your service.   This functionality is provided for you automatically...

I seem to be getting asked this question alot lately. In Visual C++ 6.0, symbol files are generated automatically for debug build configurations of your project. For release build configurations, they are not. Does this mean that you cannot generate symbol...

I have just always used _ATL_DEBUG_INTERFACES and never really considered using _ATL_DEBUG_REFCOUNT . After investigating this further, this is what I found (referring to ATL v7.1): From Atldef.h: #ifdef _ATL_DEBUG_REFCOUNT #ifndef _ATL_DEBUG_INTERFACES...